


The Mountain, the Forest, and the Earth

by Deepdarkwaters



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-08
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-07 01:18:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6779182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/pseuds/Deepdarkwaters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eggsy believes in ghosts the way he believes in oxygen and gravity: they exist, they serve their purpose, but no amount of droning from his teachers is going to make him understand the whys or the hows.</p><p>Oxygen: sucked painfully into his lungs through a throat that feels as tight as the eye of a needle, the taste of blood from his split lip and bitten tongue streaming down with it.</p><p>Gravity: just put one foot in front of the other, you got this, you done this a million times, don't look down don't look down don't look don't</p><p>Ghosts: the man with the antlers is watching him again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mountain, the Forest, and the Earth

**Author's Note:**

> Ok I don't exactly know what this is but I'm having fun with it so I hope it amuses someone! It's inspired by Pan's Labyrinth because I wanted an excuse to write 1) a horror/fairytale type AU and 2) some Triwizard Tournament style magic tasks instead of normal agent training, but it's not really a crossover or fusion except for some stolen details (e.g. hell yes the Pale Man will make an appearance). Also, instead of the faun from the film it's a (very) loose version of the old English [Herne](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herne_the_Hunter) character.

There's no official law in place, but there doesn't need to be. Everybody knows you don't stay outside after sundown.

Sometimes in the night there are strange, unsettling noises: the steady tap of feet as someone passes the front door. There's no way of knowing which side they're on. They could be dangerous, or they could be keeping danger at bay. Either way, it's best not to question it. Resist the temptation to peek out between your blinds into the darkness, go back to the brightness and blare of the game shows on telly.

If you peek anyway and you see shadows moving, you can't say you weren't warned.

 

* * *

 

Eggsy believes in ghosts the way he believes in oxygen and gravity: they exist, they serve their purpose, but no amount of droning from his teachers is going to make him understand the whys or the hows.

Oxygen: sucked painfully into his lungs through a throat that feels as tight as the eye of a needle, the taste of blood from his split lip and bitten tongue streaming down with it.

Gravity: just put one foot in front of the other, you got this, you done this a million times, don't look down don't look down don't look don't

Ghosts: the man with the antlers is watching him again.

Eggsy lands heavily from the high ledge, crouching into a roll to soften the impact and using the momentum to rise to his feet. In the purple twilight Rowley Way looks different, the way everything looks different after dark: the corners softened, the colours dimmed, everything familiar magicked away leaving only an overwhelming sense of dread. It's like those dreams where you're lost and you know something terrible is going to happen if you can't find Ariadne's thread, but there's already some pretty terrible shit happening at home. At least out here there's space to breathe. If he dies, at least it won't be with cruel fingers round his neck and beer breath in his face.

"I don't want no trouble," Eggsy says to the figure breathing quietly in the shadows. He raises his hands slowly, supplicating, the way you get taught in school from age five. "I just wanna get some air, alright?"

All these times he's seen the man with antlers lurking about the estate and this is the first time he speaks.

"Is there no air inside your house?"

His voice is nothing at all like Eggsy expected. You always think the ghosts and gods are going to have voices like rumbling thunder. This one just sounds _amused_.

"It's dirty air." He stands his ground, hands still raised, though there's some reckless part of him that wants to step into the shadows for a closer look at the man. "All fags and farts and beer and sick. My mum's pregnant, my stepdad's drunk, I fucking hate being in there when it's like this. Rather take my chances with the, you know." He hesitates, rifling through all the possible words in his head and finding nothing that fits what he means. "The elements," he finishes weakly.

"The elements." The voice from the shadows repeats it, approving. "Well, you're full of surprises."

"How so?"

"This is the longest conversation I've had with one of your kind for a terribly long time. Usually you scream like pigs and run away."

"Well, to be fair you're fucking terrifying." He's even more convinced he's dreaming now, barely believing his own nerve. _Don't talk to the ghosts and the gods_. You learn it in infant school even before they start you on the wonders of the two times table. _Hands up. Bow your head. Don't look them in the eyes. Answer if you're spoken to. Otherwise, stay silent_. "Who are you?"

"Me? I've had so many names." The shadows in the corner of the stairs are so dark they look like a piece has been rubbed entirely from existence, except for those glinting eyes hovering seven feet up in the blackness and the antlers just visible above, black branching lines where the shadows blend into the dingy yellow glow of a streetlamp. "Old names that only the wind and the trees can pronounce. I am the mountain, the forest and the earth."

"That ain't an answer."

"Shakespeare called me Herne the Hunter."

Eggsy feels an ominous tingle of dread shudder through him, a cascade of ripples spreading outwards from the pit of his stomach and raising all the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck. "If I ask what you hunt am I gonna regret it?"

"Look, if I wanted you dead there'd be nothing left of you but a smudge on the concrete."

There's movement in the dead space of the shadows and Eggsy takes a hurried few steps back. "I'll just go home, alright? Sorry I was out. I know it's your turf after night, yeah—" But even as he says it, he knows he's not moving anywhere; the tantalising need to _see_ holds him exactly where he is, heart hammering and palms damp with sweat as the nothingness of the shadows turns solid. For a moment the fear is so mesmerising it's almost a hallucination, he almost believes he sees the shadows forming the sickening, uncanny bend and length of caprine limbs – but then the moonlight lands on the figure of a man in a suit, with arms and legs like any other man. Of course he's _not_ like any other man – he's seven feet tall with fucking _antlers_. His skin in the gibbous light gleams blue, swirled darker in spirals of dotted tattoos over his forehead and around his eyes, and _his eyes_ : long black lashes and indigo sclera flecked with silver. There are no pupils in his eyes; there are galaxies.

Eggsy bows the way he was taught and stays there, barely breathing. The back of his neck feels horribly bare, presented like this to the stranger, but the thought of standing straight before he's invited to is repulsively awful. Dean tries to make him bow, even though he shouldn't be fucking about with the rules of protocol like that, and Eggsy usually tells him to fuck himself, or he does it so grudgingly it becomes a hateful little head-shake instead of deference. Not now. He stays perfectly still, staring at the floor until the footsteps he can hear on the concrete come into view: beautifully polished leather shoes and the chalk and charcoal stripe of the man's trousers.

"You may call me Harry Hart," he man, ghost, god, whatever, tells him, and Eggsy looks up finally, and then _up_ because fucking hell he is tall. "A name more suited to this century, I think."

"Heart like heartbeat?" Eggsy asks, trying to settle the rapid pace of his breathing before he has a full on panic attack – but when Harry speaks again the fake-scornful tone of his voice is so _human_ that Eggsy can't help it, he actually fucking laughs along with him, relaxes his ramrod posture a bit, and finally drops his hands to his sides

" _No_ , Eggsy. Hart like a stag, on account of these antlers you may have missed growing from my head."

"No, I did kinda notice, guv. Sir," he amends quickly, though Harry just looks amused again the way people sometimes look amused at a misbehaving puppy. "You know my name."

"Of course."

"Why's it of course?"

"I've been watching you for some time now."

"Well that ain't creepy or nothing." There's a curl of something lurching and strange in his stomach: not nausea, not even really fear any more. Something like excitement, like his body suspects before his brain does that the world is going to change for him tonight in ways he can't yet comprehend. "Why?"

"I gave you a talisman seventeen years ago."

It's not a memory that makes his heart flip; it's more like the memory of a memory. Eggsy knows about being visited by a god after his dad's death from the stories his mum used to tell him when he was little, but either he was too young to remember it happening or it was too big for him and he filed it away somewhere inside his mind too deep to recover. There's something familiar about the story anyway, like dreaming the scent of a fairground and waking up with odd shifting shadow-memories of hot dogs and waltzers.

Immediately after that comes the uneasy sense of trepidation, and he curls his hands into fists because he feels like they want to raise in supplication again. "Yeah. My stepdad sold it to one of them dodgy dealers in Brixton, I ain't seen it in years. I'm really sorry, I never meant to lose it. I swear I fought him like a fucking wolf but I was only fourteen, I couldn't stop him."

But Harry just shrugs, unconcerned. "A trinket. It was worthless." Then his hand, blue skin whorled and dotted with ink spots like his face, reaches for Eggsy and taps him softly between the collarbones with a single fingertip right on the place where the talisman used to rest before Dean ripped it off him. There's a flare of heat, painful for less than a second before fading to a weirdly pleasant tingle; Eggsy looks down at himself then, quickly flicking open the buttons on his polo shift to find a silvery circle like old scar tissue, crossed through the middle with something that looks like a rune or a symbol from some long-forgotten language. "The real magic was here all along," Harry tells him. "You never used it. I couldn't help wondering why."

"I never knew! I thought it was the actual pendant, like a favour token."

"Yes, I probably could have been clearer about that," Harry says ruefully. "Don't have much experience talking to six year olds, I'm afraid." He watches Eggsy refasten his collar buttons – at least Eggsy assumes he watches; it's impossible to tell what those inhuman, star-speckled eyes are looking at – and suddenly he turns, shoe heels clicking smartly against the concrete as he walks away towards the main road. "Come along, Eggsy."

"Wait." He has to scurry to keep up with Harry's ridiculous fairytale seven-league steps. "Where are we going?"

"Job interview, if you're interested."

Working with a god. Or for a god. Whatever it is, it can hardly be worse than this half-existence he's stuck in now.

"You think I got anything to lose?" he asks, and beside him Harry smiles with all the universe alight in his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know why I've even marked this Teen, it's very likely to rocket up to Explicit later if I can figure out the logistics of banging a seven foot god with antlers :P


End file.
